Lovers on All Saints' Day by Juan Gabriel Vásquez Read Free Book Online Page B

it was a shame that children here didn’t dress up and go out and ask for candy. She told me about Celtic legends, drew their symbols, wrote out for me the names of some of their goblins. Pinch. Grogan. Jack-in-Irons.
    Michelle, the woman who was still my wife. Who had been far from me for so long, too long.
    —
    W HEN I GOT HOME , the fog had not yet cleared. I opened the gate and the iron stuck to my fingers like dry ice. Before I got to the stone steps, I saw Michelle standing in front of me in underwear and a T-shirt, a paper tissue clutched in her right hand. Her eyes were the color of her hair and the tip of her nose looked irritated.
    “Go inside,” I said. “You’re going to catch cold.”
    “You told me,” she responded.
    “Calm down, nothing happened.”
    “You told me you were coming back. I fell asleep, but I was waiting for you until half an hour ago. I was waiting for you, I fell asleep, you didn’t come back.”
    I held her gently: her body was like a badly fired ceramic and was threatening to crack or fall to the floor and smash into pieces. She kept talking.
    “But I don’t want this to happen again. I don’t want nights like this.”
    “Nobody wants nights like this,” I said. “But we still have time.”
    “You wanted to leave. I know it. You don’t have to lie to me.”
    “Come on, let’s go upstairs.”
    “I’ve been crying all night. I’m tired.”
    “Yes, but you don’t know how much I want to be with you.”
    We went upstairs. It was warm in the bedroom and it was good to be back. I took off my clothes and lay down on the bedspread. Michelle lay down beside me. “You’re exhausted,” she murmured. “I can tell.” A crow flew past the big window that overlooked the lake, and I asked Michelle to close the curtains. In that lake there were small trout. The day I asked Michelle to marry me, I remembered, I’d caught two. At that moment, two trout had seemed like a good sign.
    “I wonder where the bird is,” said Michelle. “I hope he’s died, poor thing.”
    “Hope so,” I said.
    I thought later I’d go out to look for the pheasant, and that I’d like Michelle to come with me to look for it. I thought of proposing this to her, but she’d fallen asleep on my shoulder. I wanted to explain that we were going to be okay. I wanted to tell her that we’d made a lot of mistakes, and hurt each other a lot, but we didn’t do any of it out of cruelty, but rather trying, maybe in mistaken ways, to suffer as little as possible. I surprised myself feeling that the most difficult part had just begun.
    “Nobody wants nights like these,” I said to Michelle, although she couldn’t hear me. “We’re not going to have to live alone.”
    With the tip of my thumb I wiped away a dribble of saliva at the corner of her mouth. She snuggled her head against my chest and I closed my eyes to listen better to the silence of the early hours, the way the murmur of the heating mingled with the sounds of the Ardennes just as Michelle’s breathing began to mingle with mine.
    —
    W E LET THE MORNING go by without rushing it, and around midday I discovered there was no dry wood to light a fire with. I hadn’t been able to at Zoé’s house, either—Zoé, that already strange name, that distant night that belonged to her, not to me—and now the image and feeling of a crackling log fire turned into a sort of craving. But I didn’t go out to Modave to get a bundle, because I didn’t like the idea of being away from Michelle. Instead, I phoned Van Nijsten’s shop, in Aywaille, and a woman asked me to wait, and while I did an electronic version of a Jacques Brel song played in my ear. Then the same woman told me that Van Nijsten wasn’t there but someone would deliver my order in thirty minutes.
    “Anything else?” asked the woman.
    “She’s asking if we want anything else,” I said.
    “Not for me,” said Michelle.
    Michelle had taken a long shower, and after her shower we’d made